A heartfelt reckoning with Australia's history of colonialism, racism, and Whiteness

Life experiences shape us, for better or for worse. They can be rich, meaningful, and beautiful. They can be awful and scar us for life. Much of our experience is shaped/determined by the family, culture, and moment we were born into. 

Both Stan Grant and I were born in Australia in the early 1960s and went to high school in the Canberra suburb of Belconnen. Besides, living many years outside Australia, perhaps that is the sum total of our common life experience. He has been successful as a journalist, both internationally and in Australia.

Stan Grant is a Wiradjuri man. His grandparents' home was bulldozed by the Police with the authority of the British crown. His family was dirt poor, always lived on the fringes of towns, and moved continually as his father sought itinerant work. He never stayed in one school for more than a year. No one in his family finished high school, let alone attended university. He says his family was characterised by love. His grandfather fought for Australia in World War II, but when he returned, he was not allowed to go to the local pub to share a drink with his mates. Other returned soldiers were entitled to housing. His grandfather was not. Family members were often harassed by the police. One was put in prison for speaking his native language. Until his family moved to Canberra when he was a teenager, most of his peers were indigenous.

In contrast, I spent the first 22 years of my middle-class life in the same house, my father had the same job that whole time,  both my parents had a Ph.D., and the schools I attended were "lily white".

Literature can be powerful because it can create empathy. It can help us see and feel the world through the eyes and experiences of another person. Incidentally, this is one argument for the importance of the humanities and a liberal arts education. 

Grant is a gifted writer, and his book, The Queen is Dead gave me a glimpse into a world so different to my own, even though it is spatially close and overlapping. The emotions I experienced included sadness, confusion, shock, anger, embarrassment, powerlessness, despair, frustration, and guilt. I guess that my emotional responses are tame and transient compared to the raw emotions that Grant lives with, day in and day out.

Most chapters begin with the refrain. "The White Queen is dead."  The book is prompted by the death of the British monarch in 2023. It is not about her as a person. "The White Queen is a metaphor". (page 9). The book is a personal reckoning with the legacy of colonialism and racism in Australia.

"How do we live with the weight of history? How do we not fall prey to soul-destroying vengeance and resentment, yet never relent in our righteous demand for justice?" (page 5).

Reflecting on his and others' response to the death of the White Queen, he states:

"And in my anger I am confronted again by the two consuming questions of my life: what is Whiteness? And what is it to live with catastrophe?" (page 54)

While in primary school, a white student asked Stan, "Why are you so Black?" (page 84). This incident has tormented him his whole life, and he keeps coming back to it in the book.

Grant reflects painfully on public events over the past quarter of a century that have attracted media attention and have a racist dimension. This includes the significance of the Sydney Olympics in 2000 for Australian identity, Cathy Freeman's gold medal in the 400 metres at that Olympics, the abuse of footballer Adam Goodes, the sponsorship of the Australian women's netball team by Hancock Prospecting, Hawthorn Football Club's treatment of indigenous players, and  Grant's experience working for and eventual departure from the public broadcaster ABC News. He helped me see these events in a raw and painful way.

Grant provides a helpful critique of modernity and the Enlightenment. White men "invented modernity as a place of endless possibility." (page 19). The freedom promised often degenerated into tyranny. Modernity provided an intellectual framework and justification for racism and colonialism. 

"Identities can nourish us. They can give us community. Identities can give us voice. That notion of identity is a conceit of the West - identity as freedom. But identity can also - and far more often than not, in fact - be a pathway to tyranny." (page 23).

"Modernity has supplanted god with its own faith in progress and reason. The liberalism that emerged out of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment imagines that we can wash ourselves clean of the past. But there can be no redemption without atonement." (page 214)

We discussed the book this month in the theology reading group. At first glance, the book might not appear to have much theology, particularly if you read the publisher's blurb

Grant dedicates the book :

To Baiame, my creator

To Jesus Christ, my saviour

To Yindyamarra, the Spirit

"Vindicate me, O God. And plead my cause against an ungodly nation" (Psalm 43:1)"

Theological allusions are scattered through the book. Two short sections (pages 207-211 and 272-278) focus on theology. He engages with Simone Weil, the mystic who had a strong solidarity with the oppressed, and Miroslav Volf.

The first section reflects on his experience of church while growing up. A similar reflection is in a beautiful and powerful article, “This is the way healing begins”: Recovering the language of lament in a disenchanted age 

"For me, Easter is not a time of resurrection. I don’t rush to Easter Sunday but dwell in the darkness of Holy Saturday — the day after the crucifixion, when those closest to the crucified Christ shivered in fear. On that day there is no promise of tomorrow. There is no hope. It is the day when faith itself feels destitute.

It was the darkness of Holy Saturday that I felt — deep in my bones — when I was a little boy. I felt it in the church on the mission on the outskirts of Griffith in New South Wales that was a home, spiritually and physically, to my family. It could have been any of the missions scattered across our country. The places to which we were banished, and yet managed to find refuge.

There was a tiny wooden church on the mission. I remember cramming into the pews, with my best Sunday clothes on and my hair spit down.

My uncle was the pastor. He was an old-time fire-and-brimstone preacher. Not long into his sermon, his white shirt would be stained with sweat. He would constantly mop his brow with a handkerchief. He clutched a tattered black leather-bound copy of the King James Bible under one arm, yet never needed to read from it. He could recite the scripture from memory. With his other arm he would point. Each word landing — and I felt always landing on me.

My head would ache in that church. I would twitch and look out the window. I felt a heavy weight in that church. I have felt it in other black churches, places where our people come to worship. We pray differently. We sing differently. Our hymns are songs of sorrow...

Ours, you see, was the church of the forsaken.

Why, you may be wondering, am I talking about God, about the church, about Christianity? Is that not the religion of empire? Isn’t Christianity the legacy of colonisation? Certainly since the time of the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine, Christianity has been wielded as the divine right of kings. It has interwoven itself with power and tyranny.

Yes, those proclaiming the word of God came to this land with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other. The doctrine of discovery, of terra nullius, was itself a sort of decree — that any land not belonging to a Christian monarch was free for the taking.

Yes, God sat astride empire. But that was not our God. That is Christendom, not Christianity. God did not arrive here with the first fleet. We knew God. We walked in God’s creation, in the land that God had given us. We told stories to God. We painted God on our rocks and on our bodies. We had our word for God: Baiame.

When we heard the stories of Jesus, we heard the story of a dark-skinned man in a land of empire. Oppressed and colonised. A tribal man. We heard the story of someone speaking back to power. We heard the words of an ancestor. And in the crucifixion. We felt the wounds. We felt the shame. We felt the abandonment."

This is how theology should be done: personal and contextual, rather than impersonal and abstract. 

Stan Grant writes some wonderful columns every fortnight for The Saturday Paper. There is also a beautiful episode, "Disenchanted Age" of the Undeceptions podcast, where he is interviewed by John Dickson.

Origins of the modern quest for certainty: part 2

Part of the modern worldview is the belief that certain truth is attainable and that there is a single universal method (science) for obtaining that truth. People have not always thought that way. It is debatable whether quest for certain truth in all areas of life is possible or even desirable. Previously, I explored how the amazing success of Newtonian mechanics fueled hubris and confidence in certainty and method, along with several other worldviews.

Not being a historian I did not realise that the modern turn to certainty and method came before Newton's success and was fueled by Rene Descartes who in 1637 published, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences. Newton was born six years later.

This turn is emphasised by the philosopher Stephen Toulmin in his 1990 book, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. He argued Descartes' work was influenced by his own political context.

I first became aware of this important work through Miroslav Volf. His book, Exclusion and Embrace, contains the following text. 

In Cosmopolis Stephen Toulmin has argued for a need to revise the traditional account of the rational method's emergence. Rather than having been born out of tranquil decontextualized reflection, it was formulated in response to a given historical situation—to the ravages of the Thirty Years War fought in the name of differing religious persuasions. Toulmin writes: 

If uncertainty, ambiguity, and the acceptance of pluralism led, in practice, only to an intensification of the religious war, the time had come to discover some rational method for demonstrating the essential correctness or incorrectness of philosophical, scientific, or theological doctrines. (Toulmin 1990, page 53) 

Enter Descartes. In Discourse on Method he proposed the one correct method to acquire absolutely certain knowledge. The Thirty Years' War had more to do with this proposal than did the day he spent "shut up in a room heated by an enclosed stove" where he had, as he writes, "complete leisure to meditate on my own thoughts". 

Ever since Descartes, modernity has been dominated by "the charms of certainty and uniqueness" (Toulmin 1990, page 75) and has continued to dream of a purely rational method and a unified science which would provide a single right answer to any given question. Without a rational method we will end up disagreeing, and without agreement, we will end up fighting. The desire for peace gave birth to the belief that we can tell the one single truth about our societies and their history, and indeed about the makeup of the whole world. If there were no such truth, war seemed inescapable. 

 

Exclusion and Embrace by Miroslav Volf revisited

 This month's theology reading group discussed Exclusion and Embrace: A theological exploration of identity, otherness, and reconciliation by Miroslav Volf. Wikipedia has a useful brief summary of the book.

I first read the book and discussed it in a group twelve years ago and wrote several blog posts about it. I have significantly benefited from re-reading it. Late in life, I now see the immense value of re-reading excellent books, particularly dense and profound ones. Over the past decade, I have built a greater knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of theology and philosophy, and how they engage (for better or worse) with modernism and postmodernism. This has increased my enjoyment and understanding of the book.

The book is impressive for both its scope and coherence. It covers a wide range of Biblical passages, events, histories, philosophies, and theologies. Furthermore, these topics and themes are woven together in a coherent whole. By his example, Volf makes a strong case that Christian theology should be public, for the sake of pluralistic societies and for the sake of the church.

Volf makes a convincing case for the following ideas.

Conflicts, small and large, are intertwined with questions of identity and otherness.

The natural outcome of an encounter with the "other", someone with a different identity to us, is exclusion. Discrimination, violence, and genocide are manifestations of the drive to exclude the other.

The counterpoint to exclusion is embrace, even embrace of enemies. There are many complexities to working out what such an embrace looks like. This requires grappling with issues of history, memory, truth, justice, peace, and forgiveness.

Evil exists. It must be grappled with politically, philosophically, and theologically. Both modernism and postmodernism have failed in their woeful inability to seriously engage with the concept of evil.

The Cross of Christ provides the template and resources to grapple, both intellectually and practically, with why and how, we need to move from exclusion to embrace.

In spite of the claims of modernity to the contrary, discussions of truth and justice can only be and should be conducted with reference to a specific tradition. [This reiterates the perspective of Alisdair MacIntyre.] There is no "view from nowhere", i.e, a perspective that is completely objective.

To grapple with conflicting identities, traditions, and perspectives we need to  practice "double vision" [taken from Thomas Nagel] whereby I acknowledge I have "the view from here" and work hard to engage with "the view from there". In different words, I endeavour to put myself in the shoes of the "other", even when I consider them morally repugnant or intellectually flawed.

For a Christian, nonviolence is the way to work towards peace. This is rooted in both the Cross, the Ressurection, and the hope of the Final Judgement. Evil not only exists but it will be punished, and in a just way. But, fallible humans are prone to deception and revenge. And so, that final judgement must rest with God, as Jesus embodied and Paul taught.

Seek the welfare of the city

What should the role and responsibilities of Christians be in the public square?
How can secular democracies function when many citizens are religious?

This past month at my theology book discussion group we read and discussed Miroslav Volf's book, A Public Faith: How followers of Christ should serve the common good

My first problem with this book was that my expectations were too high. Volf's earlier book Exclusion and Embrace, is a hard act to follow. It is highly original and challenging, particularly in its engagement with postmodern literature.

I mainly recommend it because it wrestles with important issues that need to be addressed by both Christians and non-Christians.

What is the "common good"? It is "human flourishing". Christians can serve others. They can also question things in society that are preventing people from flourishing. An example is how Western secular society has degenerated into a focus on "experiential satisfaction." This follows the change in the USA from a focus on God to Nation to self, as described by Andrew Delbanco in The Real American Dream.

I think Volf may be a little weak in his view of the prophetic role of Christians. He seems so keen to find common ground and get a "seat at the table" that he is reluctant to be marginalised by them calling on society to repent and to right injustices.

I feel the book may be too controlled by responding to extremist agendas, caricatures, and critiques. Significant space is spend responding to the influential Muslim, Sayyid Qutb. It reminds me of yet another book on "creation vs. evolution" which is responding to a debate defined by extremists such as Richard Dawkins and Ken Ham.

Previously, I posted about how I don't like the label "science and faith". Similarly I don't like the label of "faith-based initiatives". The problem is that this plays to secularist claims that contrast "faith" and "reason" and "evidence". There is just as much "faith" and "personal values" in the views and policies of right-wing conservatives, Marxists, libertarians, Muslims, neoliberals, .... and Christian activists.

The book could have benefited from some concrete discussion and examples of how his proposals might work in practice. One example might be the Clapham Sect, associated with William Wilberforce.

Nevertheless. the book is a valuable contribution. Jeremiah 29 says

4 “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 5 Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. 6 Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. 7 But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

On books clubs, politicians, and money

For the past few years I was in a really nice theological "book club" that read and discussed a wide range of meaty works by authors such as Miroslav Volf, Stanley Hauerwas, Albert Wolters, Karl Barth, Augustine, ...
I wrote many posts stimulated by these readings. Unfortunately, the group wound down last year due to declining interest and because our fearsome leader Luke Glanville left Brisbane to take up a new academic position at ANU.

I was delighted last year when I learnt there was another group in Brisbane with similar interests, led by Charles Ringma, and they allowed me to join. This group reads a slightly greater pace, often covering one book per month.

Our first book is Globalisation, Spirituality, and Justice by Daniel Groody. Hopefully, I will write some posts about it. On the lighter side I was amused to read in the first chapter how some have proposed that  politicians in the USA should wear uniforms like NASCAR drivers that clearly display their corporate sponsors.

Music in hell

War is hell: hate, broken relationships, violence, death, suffering, humiliation, evil, injustice, ....

I felt this again watching Paradise Road. It is based on the true story of women in a prisoner of war camp during WWII. To cope they form a vocal orchestra, that unites them, gives them dignity, and makes some emotional connection with their Japanese captors.

One noteable line concerns different attitudes towards the guards who often humiliated the women. One woman asks another [a missionary], "Why don't you hate them?".
"I can only feel sorry for them."

It raised many of the issues discussed by Miroslav Wolf, in "Exclusion and Embrace." How do the abused respond to their abusers?

Talk on personal conflict and peacemaking

Last year at our church we worked through some material from The Peacemaker by Ken Sande. My wife and I also attended a weekend workshop to learn to apply some of the ideas in practical situations. I find it very challenging. But then the teachings of Jesus are!

Tonight in Ljubljana, Robin and I have been invited by ZVES a University student group to talk about some these ideas concerning personal relational conflict. Given that this part of the world has experienced conflict far beyond anything we have, we have a lot to learn. Here are the slides we are using for the talk. We look forward to learning from the participants in the discussion time.

Some Slovenian friends suggested this Youtube video [partly in Slovenian] is a somewhat amusing but cutting introduction to the issue.

At a deep theological and academic level, Miroslav Wolf's book, Exclusion and Embrace, provides a challenging perspective on the issue.

A typology for Christians interacting with society

Yesterday I enjoyed being at First Presbyterian Church Berkeley. The sermon by Ian Noyes was on Romans 12:9-21 which presents many challenges to Christians on how they relate to their opponents.

Ian made use of Miroslav Volf's “Two Noes and One Yes”. I had not heard of this before and found it helpful and challenging. I found Tim Keller also invokes this in his book Center Church: Doing balanced, gospel-centered ministry in your city. Here is the relevant quote:

Miroslav Volf titles a section of his book A Public Faith “Two Noes and One Yes”. This means, first, saying no to what he calls “total transformation” - to a goal of transforming the whole culture we inhabit. What Christians build culturally is not like the modern cities (Brasilia is the best example) that are built from scratch. It is like rehabilitating an existing city while living in it. It means, second, saying no to what he calls “accommodation”. Finally, we say yes to “engagement”, which Volf describes as “expressing the middle between abandoning and dominating the culture… what it might mean to assert one’s difference while remaining within it,” of “leaving without departing”.

Similar considerations apply to Christians interacting with universities. 

The violent overthrow of liberal Western theology

 Today I finished reading Miroslav Volf's Exclusion and Embrace and we have our last discussion group on it. The last chapter "Violence and Peace" took the discussion in directions I did not anticipate. First, he looked at the implications of the book of Revelation's portrayal of God's justice and judgement being implemented violently. I find the following paragraph  fascinating and challenging (and hard to argue against).

My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this chapter was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.

M. Wolf, Exclusion and Embrace, p. 304

What is justice?

In 1843 General Charles Napier conquered Sind and installed the order of British colonial rule, no doubt to bring the blessings of civilization to the "inferior races". When the British came, one of the colonial impositions they instituted was the prohibition of sati - of widows being cremated on their husbands' funeral pyres. They were shrewd enough to tolerate a number of native peculiarities, but not the burning of widows. The Brahmans of Sind, however, defended sati as an age-old custom. General Napier's response was as simple as it was arrogant: "My nation also has a custom. When men burn women alive, we hang them. Let us all act according to national custom!" 

Sometimes this story is told as a polemical tool to underline the clear moral superiority of certain practices over others. It is possible, however, to see it as an extreme case of competing, indeed clashing, justices...

Miroslav Volf begins his chapter on Oppression and Justice in Exclusion and Embrace with this story. It certainly got my attention!

One mans justice is another man's (or woman's) injustice. Volf reviews three dominant ways of dealing with the issue of clashing justices

• the universalist affirmation that there is just one justice 
• the postmodern claim that there are a rich plurality of justices; they all need to be embraced
• the communitarian approach of placing justice within a tradition (Alasdair MacIntyre)

But, to the Christian the very character of the tri-une God and the gospel defines justice. (See for example Romans 3:25-26. This is my emphasis, not Volf's. Also, note that justice and righteousness are interchanged in different translations; but that underscores the point).

So shouldn't that make it all clear? Christian's should go for the first option above. But, Volf goes on (p. 198):

the argument from the character of God to universal justice and universal peace is incontrovertible. To be a follower of Jesus Christ means both to affirm that God's justice transcends all cultural construals of justice and to strive for that justice (Matthew 6:33)....

The question is whether Christians who want to uphold God's universal justice can judge between cultures with divine infallibility. The answers is that they cannot.  

For one, Christians stand inside a culture, inside a tradition, inside an interest group. Unlike God's Knowledge, their knowledge is limited and distorted. There judgements about what is just in concrete situations are inescapably particular. We must therefore distinguish between our idea of God's justice and God's justice itself.

This is quite humbling and should check us before we start off on some of our self-righteous rants about "injustices" we have experienced.... But it does seem to me there may be less ambiguity about issues we are less directly involved in...

I will try and summarise later Volf's proposals of possible ways forward.

N.T. Wright on the Atonement

This morning my son and I are discussing the chapter on Salvation in Alister McGrath's Theology: The Basics. A key issue is the nature of the atonement and the question of penal substitution. This led me to read an interesting (but rather long) article The Cross and its Caricatures by N.T. Wright which addresses some controversies in the U.K. in 2007. Below I have extracted a few paragraphs that I found helpful and challenging and are independent of the context in which the article was written.

I am one of those who think it good that the church has never formally defined 'the atonement', partly because I firmly believe that when Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn't give them a theory, he gave them a meal. Of course, the earliest exponent of that meal (Paul, in 1 Corinthians) insists that it matters quite a lot that you understand what you are about as you come to share in it; ....

Robert Jenson's .... main point is that standard theories of atonement (of how, in other words, Jesus' death effected our reconciliation with God) have located the cross within conceptualities and narratives other than the biblical one, to which the gospel writers and Paul all point as the proper matrix for understanding the event ('Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures'). Anselm cut the cross loose from its scriptural moorings and placed it within a feudal system of honour and shame; Abelard, within a story of a divine teaching programme; the Greek Fathers, within the world of mythical satanic powers. None of these is without biblical resonance, but equally none grapples with the actual story the biblical writers tell, and the way in which the gospel writers in particular present the meaning of Jesus' death primarily through a narrative, a narrative which offers itself not just as an echo of bits and pieces of the ancient scriptures of Israel but as the continuation of that story and the bringing of it to its climax.

..... The biblical doctrine of God's wrath is rooted in the doctrine of God as the good, wise and loving creator, who hates - yes, hates, and hates implacably - anything that spoils, defaces, distorts or damages his beautiful creation, and in particular anything that does that to his image-bearing creatures. If God does not hate racial prejudice, he is neither good nor loving. If God is not wrathful at child abuse, he is neither good nor loving. If God is not utterly determined to root out from his creation, in an act of proper wrath and judgment, the arrogance that allows people to exploit, bomb, bully and enslave one another, he is neither loving, nor good, nor wise.....

Miroslav Volf. In his magisterial Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994), he demonstrates, with sharp examples from his native Balkans, that it simply won't do, when faced with radical evil, to say, 'Oh well, don't worry, I will love you and forgive you anyway.' That .... is not forgiveness; it is belittling the evil that has been done. Genuine forgiveness must first 'exclude', argues Volf, before it can 'embrace'; it must name and shame the evil, and find an appropriate way of dealing with it, before reconciliation can happen. Otherwise we are just papering over the cracks. As I said early on, if God does not hate the wickedness that happens in his beautiful world, he is neither a good nor a just God, and chaos is come again.   ......the problem which Anselm already identified: you have not yet considered how serious sin is. It isn't that God happens to have a petulant thing about petty rules. He is the wise and loving creator who cannot abide his creation being despoiled. On the cross he drew the full force not only of that despoiling, but of his own proper, judicial, punitive rejection of it, on to himself. That is what the New Testament says. That is what Jesus himself, I have argued elsewhere, believed what was going on. That is what the classic Anglican formularies and liturgy say.....

Sadly, the debate I have reviewed .... shows every sign of the postmodern malaise of a failure to think, to read texts, to do business with what people actually write and say rather than (as is so much easier!) with the political labelling and dismissal of people on the basis of either flimsy evidence or 'guilt by association'. We live in difficult times and it would be good to find evidence of people on all sides of all questions taking the attitude of the Beroeans in Acts 17, who 'searched the scriptures daily to see if these things were so', instead of 'knowing' in advance what scripture is going to say, ought to say, could not possibly say, or must really have said (if only the authors hadn't made it so obscure!).

All things being equal

This past weekend I was in a discussion group about the chapter on Gender Identity in Miroslav Volf's book, Exclusion and Embrace.  I found it the most disappointing chapter for reasons I will blog about later hopefully. There was a strong emphasis on equality of the sexes and issues of superiority and subordination. But,  I wondered if equality was interpreted in a particular modern way and held as such a high value that it swamped other issues and concerns.

The United States Declaration of Independence begins:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal".
"Liberty, equality, and fraternity" is the national motto of France and was a catchcry of the French Revolution.

Is such an emphasis on equality appropriate and Biblical?

Equity is a Biblical concept. A word search on the ESV (English Standard Version) gives
11 occurences.
Kings are to rule with righteousness, justice, and equity, and the LORD will judge with justice and equity.

Perhaps the key issue is how does our notion of equity compare to Gods? Any comments?

The theology of embrace

I just finished reading the Embrace chapter of Miroslav Volf's Exclusion and Embrace. It is centred around the parable of The Prodigal Son [Luke 15:11-32].
Rather than a theological reading he reads the story at the level of social relationships. The two central themes are "the father's giving himself to his estranged son and his receiving that son back into his household" leading him to pursue the "question of how identities need to be constituted if broken relationships are to be restored."

And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.
Luke 15:20

Freedom to forgive

I am continuing to slowly work through Miroslav Wolf's Exclusion and Embrace: A theological exploration of identity, otherness, and reconciliation with a discussion group. This past week we discussed the first half of the chapter on Embrace. Here are a few quotes:

The central thesis of the chapter is that God’s reception of hostile humanity into divine communion is a model for how human beings should relate to the other. 

He considers this in terms of repentance, forgiveness, "making space in oneself for the other", and "healing of memory."

He critiques the modern notion that "Freedom is the most sacred good." The schema of "oppression" and "liberation", "victims" and "perpetrators" can be a problem because both often claim the higher moral ground and the relative roles are sometimes just determined by who is in fire. Furthermore, conflicts

"are very messy. It is simply not the case that one can construe narratives of the encournter between parties in conflict as stories of manifest evil on the one side and indisputable good on the other."          (p. 103)

He insists that love not freedom is ultimate.
Furthermore, there is no "final reconciliation", contrary to the offers of communism and the American constitution (my insertion).

I will advocate here the struggle for a nonfinal reconciliation based on a vision of reconciliation that cannot be undone....   reconciliation with the other will succeed only if the self, guided by the narrative of the triune God, is ready to receive the other into itself and undertake a re-adjustment of its identity in light of the other's alterity.  (p. 110) 

But who can we forgive? Under what conditions? I remembered once reading this story about Corrie Ten Boom being confronted with a Nazi prison guard asking for forgiveness.

Our subconscious self-righteousness

This morning, I really enjoyed our reading group which is going through Miroslav Volf's Exclusion and Embrace. This post is just about one intriguing issue which came up. Volf begins the chapter, "Exclusion" with comments from Michael Ignatieff about patronising (and self-righteous) European attitudes to ethnic conflicts. [Incidentally, Ignatieff is currently leader of the Liberal Party in Canada].

A 1995 journal article by Ignatieff, The seductiveness of moral disgust  considers the motivations for and failures of Western military interventions, particularly that in Bosnia and Kosovo:

There was a strong element of narcissism buried inside the more obvious motivations leading the West to intervene. We intervened not only to save others but also to save ourselves, or rather an image of ourselves as defenders of universal decencies. We wanted to show that Europe "meant" something, stood for toleration within a peaceable and civilized civil society. This imaginary Europe, this narcissistic image of ourselves, we believed was incarnated in the myth of a multiethnic, multiconfessional Bosnia.

The essay is reprinted in a book, The Warriors Honour: Ethnic war and the modern conscience. The book also contains an essay, "Nationalism and the narcissism of minor difference". Apparently this is an illusion to the claim of Freud that a signature of Narcissism is the amplification of "minor difference".

So what? To me this is just another example of how humans all have an incredibly powerful subconscious force driving us towards self-righteousness. This is what drives the creation, maintenance, and promulgation of religion.

God has placed within us a strong desire to be right and to be in right relationship. But we pervert this desire by trying to establish our own righteousness by self-justification and comparison to others unrighteousness. But the only way we can be right with God and be justified is if we accept his gift of righteousness provided by Jesus. (Romans 3:21-26).

The Pharisee and the Tax Collector, Gustave Dore

The irony of relativism

In his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarit,  the influential philosopher Richard Rorty suggests that "an attitude of irony" ought to replace "the rule of judgement". In particular, a person should not claim to know right and wrong but rather "admit the contingency of his or her most central beliefs and desires" and face the fact they do not "refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance".
Our freedoms are not based on any universal truth but rather:

"based on nothing more profound than the historical facts which suggest that without the protection of something like the institutions of bourgeois liberal society, people will be less able to work out their private salvations, create their private self-images, reweave their webs of belief and desire in the light of whatever new people or books they happen to encounter."

I found the following response by Miroslav Volf rather apt (and amusing):

I reject exclusion because the prophets, evangelists, and apostles tell me that this is a wrong way to treat human beings, any human being, anywhere, and I am persuaded to have good reason to believe them. An ironic stance may be all that people desire who are spoiled by affluence, because it legitimises their narcissistic obssession with "creation their private self-images" and "reweaving their webs of belief and desire". But an ironic stance is clearly not what people suffering hunger, persecution and oppression can afford... ."exclusion" does not express a preference; it names an objective evil.

Exclusion and Embrace, page 68.

Blood that binds and separates

The relationship of the church to cultures should be both transcendent and immanent. Christians should be in the world but not of the world. We are aliens and exiles but present ambassadors who become "all things for all men" and "work for the good of the city."

In concluding Chapter 1, Distance and Belonging, of Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf, suggests a "a confession-like text that expresses the need for ecumenical community in the struggle against the 'new tribalism'", following the format of the Barmen Declaration:

“You were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9). “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer males and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

All the churches of Jesus Christ, scattered in diverse cultures, have been redeemed for God by the blood of the Lamb to form one multicultural community of faith. The “blood” that binds them as brothers and sisters is more precious than the “blood,” the language, the customs, political allegiances, or economic interests that may separate them.

We reject the false doctrine, as though a church should place allegiance to the culture it inhabits and the nation to which it belongs above the commitment to brothers and sisters from other cultures and nations, servants of the one Jesus Christ, their common Lord, and members of God’s new community. 

Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, p. 54

When I read this I assumed it was a direct quote from the Barmen Declaration. It certainly sounded like it to me! I went back and read the whole Barmen Declaration so I could blog about it. But could not find the above text in it. Only then did I realise that Volf was writing from scratch.

I also found this interesting of the material in my post My Kingdom is not of this World, pointing out the enduring relevance of the Barmen Declaration to nationalistic movements (e.g., in the former Yugoslavia).

But, the main point should not be my own confusion and ramblings [which are probably only of interest to me!] but that the Cross of Christ defines true identity and community, uniting former enemies, while identifying with us in all our cultural and ethnic contexts.

The bludgeon of "rationalism"

On Saturday I was part of a great discussion of Miroslav Wolf's Exclusion and Embrace. He emphasizes how "rationalism" and "argument" are icons and bruising weapons of modernism. I started to write a post "Am I ir-rational?" arguing that in much modern discourse it seems that the label or accusation of "irrationalism" is just thrown about to denigrate people who you do not agree with, rather than taking the time to carefully engage with their views.
However, I realised I had already written such a post, more than a year ago!

The cross is a scandal for modernism

I am really enjoying reading Miroslav Wolf's book, Exclusion and Embrace.
I particularly like the way the following passage describes modernism and contrasts it to the implications of a world view centred in the Cross of Jesus Christ:

The inner logic of the cross demands acceptance of two interrelated beliefs that are deeply at odds with some basic sentiments of modernity. First, modernity is predicated on the belief that the fissures of the world can be repaired and that the world can be heeled. It expects the creation of paradise at the end of history and denies the expulsion from it at the beginning of history. ... Before the dawn of God's new world, we cannot remove evil so as to dispense with the cross.. None of the grand recipes that promise to mend all the fissures can be trusted. Whatever progress actually does take place, it also "keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of the feet" of the angel of history, as Walter Benjamin wrote..

Second, modernity has set its high hopes in the twin strategies of social control and rational thought. "The right design and the final argument can be, must be, and will be found", is modernity's credo (Bauman, 1993)... The "wisdom of the cross", to the contrary, teaches that ultimately salvation does not come either from the "miracle" of the right design or from the "wisdom" of the final argument (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:18-25). We cannot and ought not dispense with "design" and "argument"... But, ...[they] themselves will themselves need to be healed by the "weakness" and "foolishness" of the self-giving love. This "weakness" is "stronger" than social control and this "foolishness" is "wiser" than rational thought.

Collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge in 1940 due to a design flaw.